I’ve been getting a lot of emails from friends who have friends or relatives trapped in Puerto Rico. With food and water supplies questionable, they’re looking for ideas on how to get out. Unfortunately there are only a handful of flights operating daily from the main San Juan airport. I checked the JetBlue web site and it seems that there is ample capacity on flights out of nearby places such as the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos. This leads me to wonder why, as part of the relief efforts, the government hasn’t rented a Boeing 767 or similar-sized plane (300-400 passengers in single-class configuration) to run a $100/person shuttle service to get people to Punta Cana, D.R., Provo, etc.
If the argument is “Those other countries don’t want a lot of refugees camped in their airports” then we can send Obama and Hillary to explain to them how accepting refugees boosts a country’s economic growth. If our brightest political minds are unpersuasive, seats on the shuttle could be limited to those who have a confirmed prepaid reservation for an onward flight.
There are charter companies operating privately in Puerto Rico right now that can do this, but they operate small planes and therefore can’t make a real dent in the queue of people who want to leave and are willing to pay to leave. Tradewind is a reputable example. They currently have two PC-12s flying out of San Juan. Each plane can hold a maximum of 9 passengers, depending on seating configuration. It is roughly $4,500 to get a full planeload from SJU to Punta Cana, including all of the fees on both ends (approximately $1,000 in fees; a good preview of what the U.S. system might look like after the airlines take over Air Traffic Control). I contacted Tradewind and their schedule is getting tight, but they had availability for next-day flights.
In the old days when something bad happened in a remote location, a government would send a big ship to pick up its citizens who wanted to get out. Why not do the same thing this week in Puerto Rico, but updated to “big plane”? (Though I guess if the airports are maxed out, it would also work to load people onto cruise ships for the short trip to a nearby island with good airport capacity.)
“Puerto Rico’s main airport is barely functioning” (CNN, 9/26) says “On Monday there were only 10 commercial flights between San Juan and the mainland United States, with 10 more scheduled for Tuesday,” and “At the same time, many more military, charter and relief operation jets are also flying in and out of the airport, according to the FAA.” It seems as though the main obstacle to getting people out is a refusal to relax bureaucratic requirements: “Airlines are having difficulty printing out boarding passes that fliers need to go through TSA checkpoints and board flights.” But what is the likelihood of terrorists making their way to Puerto Rico in order to blow up a shuttle flight to Punta Cana? Why not collect $100, make sure that nobody is bringing an actual gun on the plane, and lift off? Load up with food and water from Club Med Punta Cana and come back. Repeat. We were able to do this for the Berlin Airlift with vastly more primitive equipment. Despite passengers often being armed, nobody hijacked an aircraft that was taking them out during the Fall (Liberation?) of Saigon.
Related:
- Canadian welcome for Syrian refugees (using a daily Airbus A380 or Trump’s idle Boeing 757 to deliver to Canadians what they say they want)
- “Hate Taxes? Move To Tax-Free Puerto Rico, Stay American, Avoid IRS” (Forbes)… it seemed like a good idea back in 2014.
Regardless of the political arguments above, I’ve been wondering why I haven’t heard of C-5s, C-17s, hospital ships, aircraft carriers, army corp of engineers, seabees, cargo ships, etc. headed to Puerto Rico. (Maybe they are doing so, but I just haven’t heard.)
Jerry: Agreed. I don’t know of any military conflict right now that requires the full U.S. war machine. Why can’t they take a break from the quagmires in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, for example? Are they afraid they’ll miss some important fighting?
They would need $20,000 of guaranteed basic income to sleep anywhere.
lion: The people I’ve heard from have plenty of income and savings. In many cases they primarily live in the mainland U.S. They were in Puerto Rico on a temporary basis and now they find themselves stuck.
If the argument is “Those other countries don’t want a lot of refugees camped in their airports” then we can send Obama and Hillary to explain to them how accepting refugees boosts a country’s economic growth
This is an odd statement. It’s unlikely that either person has ever claimed that refugees boost growth by camping out in airports.
Hurricane season is my favorite Florida/Carribean vacation time too! I sense an opportunity for small helicopter businesses to swoop in – no airports are needed. Ready to donate.
Several aircraft carriers based in Norfolk, are in Norfolk, VA. How long would it take them to travel to PR, pick up 2000 of them to sit on the flight deck, then drop them off near the Dominican airport, then repeat? Current status, location of USA carriers: http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.html
“then we can send Obama and Hillary to explain to them how accepting refugees boosts a country’s economic growth.”
I know you relish an opportunity to be snarky, but you don’t need Obama or Hillary to do this, just read the HHS report prepared for the White House earlier this month.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/19/us/politics/document-Refugee-Report.html
This is the same report which the WH attempted to quash in making its case for
reduced refugee admissions.
OK, I know this is a little off topic, but you raised the issue.
Thanks, Bill. The government bureaucracy that runs a program also has a report saying that the program is a good one and should be continued/expanded? I’m shocked!
So much ignorance in these comments.
If any of you knew the PR people…
Leave them to their island paradise…
Generous welfare+poor future time orientation = the current state of PR today.
Bill: I don’t think that study on refugees (by the agency that gets paid to bring them to the U.S.) you cited can possibly be correct.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-refugees-make-it-in-america/
says “Across the board, refugees in the U.S. are poorer than other immigrants: From 2009 to 2011, their median household income was $42,000 — $3,000 less than what other foreign-born populations were living on and $8,000 less than the median income for those born in the U.S., according to the MPI report.”
If the refugee family has two or three children and earns $42,000 per year they will be eligible for a lifetime of subsidized housing, for example. (See the income limits in your home town of NYC: http://www.nychdc.com/pages/Income-Eligibility.html )
How can a family that can’t afford to pay market prices for housing possibly provide a net boost to the U.S. economy?
You can see some of this in Table 5 of the government report as well. Only those refugee families who’ve been in the U.S. for more than 10 years earn as much as median Americans (remember that “more than 10 years” could be 25+ years). Table 4 shows that the largest group of these long-established refugees is from Vietnam. In other words, they are Asian-Americans so the correct comparison income would be substantially higher (Asian-Americans earn more than white Americans). These bureaucrats who want to keep their cushy jobs working with refugees are highlighting the economic success (mediocrity, actually) of people from a country with an educational system that puts up better PISA scores than the U.S. (see http://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=VNM&treshold=10&topic=PI for Vietnam’s PISA scores). If you take in refugees from countries that aren’t as well educated as Vietnam why would you expect them to attain the same income?
>How can a family that can’t afford to pay
market prices for housing possibly provide
>a net boost to the U.S. economy?
Through the value add of their labor which is captured by their employer (I am answering the “possibly” question, not claiming that it is so).
>If the refugee family has two or
>three children and earns $42,000
>per year they will be eligible for
>a lifetime of subsidized housing,
The relevant statistic is the fraction of this population which is actually collecting a lifetime of subsidized housing.
Google flights shows a 1 way coach ticket on a Pawa airlines MD80 on 10/3 for $99 – San Juan to Santo Domingo – less than 1 hr. flying time.
Of course PAWA only has a few planes. If you really wanted to evacuate, the thing to do would be to rent a cruise ship or ferry where you could take thousands at once.
Jackie: Thanks for that. I hadn’t even heard of PAWA. It seems that they have one flight per day from SJU. As you note, they are sold out for the next few days, but on Tuesday, October 3 and every day after they have space. The low prices and reasonably near-term availability are at odds with media reports about the situation in Puerto Rico. If society there is in danger of imminent collapse why aren’t people paying $100 to get out?
In one word: racism.
>If society there is in danger of
>imminent collapse why aren’t
>people paying $100 to get out?
Because they think their country is going to help them out in the crisis.
Because they don’t have high limit credit card that they pay off each month and wouldn’t be able to support themselves at the destination.
Because they don’t want to lose their jobs.
Because they don’t have internet so they can’t book tickets, and/or they don’t have gas so they can’t get to the airport.
Because there are other people in the community who are depending on them so they don’t want to leave.
“I’ve been wondering why I haven’t heard of C-5s, C-17s, hospital ships, aircraft carriers, army corp of engineers, seabees, cargo ships, etc. headed to Puerto Rico. ”
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politics/us-military-response-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria/index.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-efforts-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria/
USNS Comfort is also in the news, allegedly departing Norfolk today.
Neal: Thanks for the explanation of how adding citizens with low enough household income to collect welfare will make us all rich: “Through the value add of their labor which is captured by their employer (I am answering the “possibly” question, not claiming that it is so).”
I think your reasoning may depend to some extent on one of the most famous theories in economics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
More to the point, I think it is time for us to get crazy rich. The refugees who’ve been here for 4 years or less have a median household income of $32,539. They’re entitled to a package of welfare that costs more than $60,000 per year. Since the government wouldn’t lie to use and these refugees are making our society way richer, that means at least $60,000 per year in profit is generated for an employer every time a refugee worker is hired at $32,539/year.
Here is how we become infinitely rich: we become the employers of these refugees. We pay them $32,539 and then resell their labor for more than $90,000 per year, the true value. Unfortunately, the Trumpenfuhrer is wrecking our dreams to some extent by limiting the number of new refugees to 45,000 per year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-27/trump-sets-annual-refugee-limit-at-45-000-the-lowest-in-decades
If that works out to 35,000 households (a lot of refugees are individual men, right? Then the wives and children and grandparents come over as regular immigrants under family unification rules?) and we hire all of them, we get $2.1 billion in profit the first year, $4.2 billion the next year, $6.3 billion the year after, etc.
Tiago: Racism? 76 percent of Puerto Ricans are white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Puerto_Ricans (and, in any case, many of the folks who are stranded are Midwesterners)
Neal: People aren’t leaving because they don’t have gas to get to the airport? Take a look at Google Maps and you’ll see that the San Juan airport is right in the middle of San Juan. Or check http://www.airnav.com/airport/TJSJ and you’ll see that the FAA thinks it is 3 miles SE of the center of San Juan. The media would have us believe that millions of visitors and locals are in danger of starving and/or dying of dehydration and simultaneously there aren’t 135 people willing to walk 3 miles and get on a $100 MD-80 flight to Punta Cana where there is plenty of food and water? The Club Med at Punta Cana is offering rooms at $1,051 per person per week, including unlimited food, alcohol, and activities, starting on Thursday, October 5.
You expect a logical response?
When was the last time a western government, not just the US, solved a problem like this?
This is just a little climate change storm, warm up for the future as we move up the exponential function of climate change. If the US cannot solve this easy problem, then society has no hope of dealing with climate change.
Wait until something really bad happens, like crop failures in Bangladesh, the number of people without food will be in the tens of millions.
Maybe we should just let nature (i.e. climate change) take its course and cull the heard.
It will be solved the same way every modern problem is solved: more debt. Since indigenous Puerto Ricans were saturated already, we’ll just post it to the national debt. The cost will be about three aircraft carriers, easy peasy.
>I think your reasoning may
>depend to some extent on one
>of the most famous theories
>in economics
Not at all. When an employee does work they produce something of some value to the employer. Unlike the “Labor Theory of Value”, this value is not necessarily related to to wages the employee received or even some other measure of their labor’s value. We do know, however, that the value of the employee’s work product to the employer must be greater than the sum of the employee’s wages and the allocated portions of the cost of capital and overhead. If this were not so, the job would be eliminated or the employer would go bankrupt. Therefore, that value added is positive and accrues to the employer. Since the employer is a part of society, it also accrues to society. It is true that when considering the overall benefit to society, we must account for government benefits the employee may receive (this is true for all people, not just refugees). However, the appropriate number to use there is the actual cost of the benefits actually received (net of any taxes the employee paid), not the theoretical cost of providing the bucket of benefits to which the employee is theoretically entitled.
Also, the justification for admitting refugees in particular is humanitarian not economic.
>We pay them $32,539 and then resell
>their labor for more than $90,000
>per year
Why would anyone pay us 90K when they can obtain the labor for 32.5K by hiring the refugee directly?
>People aren’t leaving because
>they don’t have gas to get to
>the airport? Take a look at Google
>Maps and you’ll see that the San
>Juan airport is right in the middle
>of San Juan.
I wasn’t thinking of people next to the airport when I listed that item.
>The Club Med at Punta Cana
>is offering rooms at $1,051
>per person per week, including
>unlimited food, alcohol, and
>activities, starting on Thursday,
>October 5.
That’s $3,500 per week for a family of four. Not a great option for a household at the medium income of $365 per week. Plus they probably can’t collect any income while they are partying at Club Med.
Neal: “Why would anyone pay us 90K when they can obtain the labor for 32.5K by hiring the refugee directly?”
I apologize that my plan to make us $billions was not clearer. We will hire up all of the refugees at $32,539 per household (average). Employers that want these highly profitable workers will have no choice but to hire them from us. Since they are going to experience a boost in profit of more than $90,000 per year once they hire a refugee household they should be happy to pay us (the monopoly supplier of refugee labor) $90,000 per year. This plan cannot fail!
Neal: “That’s $3,500 per week for a family of four. Not a great option for a household at the medium income of $365 per week.”
The question wasn’t whether all 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico, or those who earn the median income, would seek to fly to Punta Cana and check into Club Med. The question was why the once/day MD-80 flight can’t be filled with 135 passengers at $100 each.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wyoming-income-equality-2012-9 says that Puerto Rico has the second-highest income inequality among U.S. states and territories (the Paradise of Big Government, i.e., the District of Columbia, is highest). The only way to have inequality is to have some people earning more than the median, right? If things in PR are as bad as the media tells us, why aren’t those comparatively rich families (or at least any non-working members, such as stay-at-home parents, children, and grandparents) on that flight to Punta Cana and taking a few weeks at Club Med?
>Employers that want these
>highly profitable workers
>will have no choice but to
>hire them from us.
Of course, owning a monopoly is good work if you can get it. In this case though, the workers would be employees not slaves. Why wouldn’t other employers hire them away from us at slightly higher wages rather than pay us for the labor? Plus, to get a monopoly we would actually need to hire all workers in the 32K wage bracket, not just the refugees. I suspect we’re a bit under capitalized for that business plan. I guess the point you are trying to make is that refugee labor couldn’t possibly be worth 90K per year; the point I’m trying to make is that it doesn’t need to be for refugee’s economic contribution to be net positive because the 90K number is based on basically a made up number not the actual cost of government services provided to the refugees.
>If things in PR are as bad as
>the media tells us, why aren’t
>those comparatively rich families
>(or at least any non-working
>members, such as stay-at-home
>parents, children, and grandparents)
>on that flight to Punta Cana and
>taking a few weeks at Club Med?
I’m not on the ground in PR and haven’t even been following the coverage closely, so I can only speculate. It could that the relatively small number of “comparatively rich families” aren’t in the extremely severe crisis being described in the media because they had days to prepare and the means to do so. Perhaps they want and are able to stay and attend to the rebuilding of the homes and businesses. For those that do want to get away, they are “comparatively rich” so their options aren’t limited to one cheap flight to DR. Being Americans perhaps they have more connection to the US and, since they aren’t in immediate extreme crisis, prefer departing for US destinations even if that is more expensive or means a bit of a wait. In any case, your argument that there couldn’t possibly be a crisis in PR because there are still spaces on a small flight to DR and vacancies at Club Med is, at best, unconvincing.
Neal: Now it makes sense to me. Right now employers are paying $32K and getting more than $90K in benefit from each refugee household. But as soon as we enter the labor market as buyers, competition among buyers (including us) will drive up the cost of this labor to roughly the $90K in benefit that each refugee household confers on employers.
To your second point, if there are only a small number of “comparatively rich families” in Puerto Rico how do they put up higher inequality numbers than anywhere in the U.S. other than D.C.? You’re saying that there is maybe just one Puerto Rican family that enjoys $300 billion in annual income and nearly every other family is right at the median? That’s why PAWA can’t fill a 135-seat MD-80 with ticket buyers?
There is a food and water crisis that threatens the survival of people in Puerto Rico (media) but “a bit of a wait” to get on a flight out to a place with ample food and water is no big deal?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/29/san-juan-mayor-criticizes-us-officials-for-calling-puerto-rico-relief-effort-good-news
is a good example. The headline says “close to genocide”. The body says “We are dying here” and “The situation in Puerto Rico remains dire as residents face shortages of food, water and fuel.” Why not pay $100 to escape genocide and death?
>Right now employers are paying
>$32K and getting more than $90K
>in benefit from each refugee household.
This misstates my claim. I claimed only that
– the value is over 32K
– the value is possibly greater than 32K plus the actual net cost of government services provided to them
– the 90K number you are using is irrelevant since it is based on the cost for a theoretical bucket of services the refugees are entitled to, not the actual cost of the actual services they are receiving.
>But as soon as we enter the
>labor market as buyers,
>competition among buyers
>(including us) will drive up the
>cost of this labor to roughly the
>$90K in benefit that each refugee
>household confers on employers.
Again, I did not claim the benefit was 90K. In any case, this is how markets work, but how is it relevant to the current situation where there is no buyer driving up prices by trying to corner to market? In the more normal situation the price of labor is going to be the lowest wage which will fill the job and is not necessarily related to the value of that job to the employer.
>There is a food and water crisis that
>threatens the survival of people in
>Puerto Rico (media) but “a bit of a wait”
>to get on a flight out to a place with
>ample food and water is no big deal?
The people whose survival is under immediate threat and the people who have the option to get on a flight out are not necessarily the same people.
>You’re saying that there is maybe
>just one Puerto Rican family that
>enjoys $300 billion in annual
>income and nearly every other
>family is right at the median?
Where exactly did I say that?
The $60,000 per year number in costs to taxpayers for each low income household was from FY2011. It is probably a lot higher now due to rising costs for health care and housing. See https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/federal-welfare-spending-to-grow-almost-80percent-over-the-next-10-years
We were lucky enough to fly out of PR before the storm hit. Jet Blue flights coming out of San Juan are actually fake. If you try buy a ticket for $99, the flight will be canceled. The flights that are coming out are actually chartered privately. We just managed to fly our baby sitter out on a chartered Delta flight after several failed attempts at regular commercial flights.
Conditions on the ground is terrible. There must be political reasons why US don’t just send a few hundred ships and bring loads of people over like Dunkirk. I mean even the Cubans and Vietnamese managed to do that. Understandably no state wants to take in 3M+ people that the majority of whom lives on welfare. The governor of PR (MIT class of ’01 btw) smartly uses that as leverage saying if US does not help, everyone is coming to the mainland.
BTW, the entire island is running on make shift diesel generators for the foreseeable future, cannot possibly be a sustainable setup.
Thanks, Robert, for the on-the-ground perspective.
Tradewind is definitely not faking their (charter) flights. So I guess the real price of guaranteed escape is closer to $500/person.
https://pawadominicana.com/en/general-information/flight-schedule
says that they’ve canceled a bunch of flights, but implies that SJU flights are operating. They are offering tickets for October 7 at $154 to Santo Domingo on 7N754. But then if you check FlightAware it doesn’t look as though flights have actually gone.
Maybe this is a counterexample to the general theory that “If it’s not on the Internet, I don’t believe it”?
Separately, I’m not sure that every state would be opposed to immigration by American citizens who collect welfare. Each person collecting SSDI brings federal dollars into a state, right? I wrote about this in http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/03/23/are-poor-people-an-economic-asset-to-a-u-s-state-or-a-liability/
Phil, market clearing price for flight out is indeed around $500-$600. It was running at $1250 to Florida a week ago and had trouble filling all the seats. Some took off with quite a few empty seats I heard.
While you might be right about the benefits of bringing in new SSDI dollars to the community, I would argue that there are many reasons Manhattanites are not rushing to welcome all of Bronx moving into Park Avenue.